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    Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape
    Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape
    Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape
    Ebook182 pages2 hours

    Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape

    By John Miller

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    Egotopia explains why individual political and economic interests have eclipsed aesthetic considerations in the rampant billboards, malls, and urban sprawl of the New American Landscape

    Egotopia begins where other critiques of the American landscape end: identifying the physical ugliness that defines and homogenizes America's cities, suburbs, and countryside. Believing that prevailing assessments of the American landscape are inadequate and injudicious, John Miller calls into question the conventional wisdom of environmentalists, urban planners,and architects alike. In this precedent-shattering examination of what he sees as the ugliness that is the American consumer society, Miller contends that our aesthetic condition can be fully understood only by explorers of the metaphoric environment.

    Metaphorically, the ugliness of America's great suburban sprawl is the physical manifestation of our increasing narcissism- our egotopia. The ubiquity of psychotherapy as a medium promoting self-indulgence has deified private man as it has demonized public man. The New American Landscape, Miller argues, is no longer the physical manifestation of public and communal values. Instead it has become a projection of private fantasies and narcissistic self-indulgence. Individual interests and private passions can no longer tolerate, nor even recognize, aesthetic concerns in such a landscape dedicated to uncompromising notions of utility.

     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Alabama Press
    Release dateAug 30, 2016
    ISBN9780817391300
    Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape
    Author

    John Miller

    John Miller's first novel, The Featherbed, received stellar reviews and earned a devoted readership upon its release in 22. Besides novels, Miller has written on culture and politics, and in his spare time he provides consulting services to local and international non-profit organizations and governments. He lives in Toronto

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      Book preview

      Egotopia - John Miller

      page.

      1

      DARK SATANIC MALLS

      For William Blake, the nineteenth-century English poet and social critic, the industrial revolution was more than an assault on agrarian sensibility and tradition. Blake understood that the forces of industrialization and the continued concentration of population in the burgeoning urban centers spelled the end of an economy and a culture defined by man’s intimate association with nature.

      For Blake, a most disturbing casualty of the industrial revolution was the demise of beauty. Machinery and the brute forces of production deflowered the tender and vulnerable aesthetics of England’s green and pleasant land. In his poem Milton, Blake warned of dark satanic mills. Images of a satanically inspired industrial ugliness choking the landscape in coal dust and chimney soot decried the factory’s ascendancy over the farm. The aesthetics of an agrarian society were literally transformed into the industrial ugliness of the shop floor, the factory yard, the dock, the mine, the mill.

      One hundred and seventy years after Blake’s death, the lost aesthetics of the pre-industrial agrarian epoch continue to attract and entice—subconsciously, subtly, yet persistently. The aesthetics of that pre-industrial agrarian epoch continue to appeal to an unidentified and unacknowledged, but no less insatiable, appetite for beauty. Our less-than-conscious infatuation with the pre-industrial agrarian past is, at some fundamental level, a yearning for the aesthetics of paradise lost.

      Of course, as both Dante and John Milton, two poets intimately associated with concepts of paradise, would attest, paradise is not paradise without the presence of man. Beauty encompasses far more than an undisturbed natural landscape. Beauty can also be the result of a particularly felicitous juxtaposition of man’s endeavors, sensitive and respectful of the prerogatives of nature. Such enriched unions of civilization and landscape are possible, if improbable, even in an urban and otherwise aesthetically oppressive environment.

      However, we possess no conscious desire to experience, nor to become proponents of, these almost magical landscapes in which man and nature create aesthetic impressions greater than the sum total of their component parts. Like some Platonic ideal, or Kantian noumena, these rare and unique couplings of man and nature seem incapable of being identified and experienced. They occur with greater frequency within the hazy realms of imagination than in the Monday mornings of a suburban rush-hour reality.

      Since the demise of the agrarian epoch, these magical landscapes have become blurred and unreliable images, elusive fancies, fleeting ethereal notions, flickering racial memories. Although the impulse to seek out and celebrate such aesthetically pleasing locales must undoubtedly whisper and cajole, such whispers incite no conscious awareness of a hunger for the aesthetics of the agrarian zeitgeist. No, we are not infatuated with the pre-industrial Eden in conscious rejection of the aesthetics of modernity. Our romantic idealization of the lost agrarian landscape animates, informs, and distorts a peculiar American attempt, not to reclaim a lost aesthetic, but to recapture the harmonious balance between man and his physical

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